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The Case for Laugh Lines

THANK goodness it was drilled into me to greet people with the words, “How do you do?” Because these days, the question that springs more frequently to mind is, “Who are you?” Not because my memory is going, but because many of my acquaintances are erasing the traces of identity, if not life, from their faces.

Now, before anyone starts turning defensive, let me turn defensive. This is not an essay about why I am categorically against cosmetic surgeries. I am as supportive as the next gal if a certain someone feels so bad about her neck that she won’t leave home, or if another is so heavy-lidded that every time he blinks he misses half the picture. Plastic surgeons have done wondrous things.

As for the proliferation of smaller cosmetic procedures? The ones your dentist offers to do while he’s in the vicinity of your mouth anyway? The injections of fillers to plump up lips, smooth wrinkles, pad out laugh lines? At this point, it’s a wonder that the salesclerk at Barneys isn’t offering to shoot up your face while you’re trying on hats.

Again, I’m not against it. Well, maybe Botox. I’m the one to call for a rant when my friends are teetering at the brink of succumbing to the needle. I mean, who wants to inject a poison so lethal that it paralyzes nerves, sending tiny muscles to atrophy?

I’m not categorically against a helping hand, so long as it has finesse. My current rule of thumb, when confronted with an enhanced face, is that if I find myself vaguely wondering whether there was work, the alteration was well done. But these days, I’m wondering why — why did you do it?

We’ve reached a stage where cosmetic surgery is so readily available that in certain circles it is expected of women and men to avail themselves of these age-deniers. (You cannot call them youth-enhancers when you are no longer young.) If you choose not to partake of the benefits of needle and knife, you are judged to be making a statement. You are taking a position against the current standards of beauty.

We have triggered a weird, collective, late-onset body dysmorphia. What’s worse is that our anxieties about aging have trickled into our children’s generation, so that the mantra about cosmetic procedures even among some 30-year-olds is “intervention early and often.”

I began to worry about all this a year ago, when I was on a book tour. I love to read aloud and watch people’s faces as they listen. Within weeks, I was profoundly in touch with my inner ham. Sometimes, I found myself straining for a response. I would look out at the audience, hearing laughter and murmurs, but seeing only stern masks. Yet afterward, those same faces would be telling me how much they had loved my presentation. It took awhile to realize that people were having trouble expressing emotion in their features.

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This is also when I began to develop the “who are you?” problem.

Too many people have had procedures that have gone awry. They look strange, and tragic. Is this inevitable? You do one thing, the effects begin to fade, you do another, and so on. You get puffy. You get rigid. Or you slide. And I wonder. Has no one said “stop”? Has no one, particularly the one wielding the needle, gently advised against further work? It used to be an unusual sight to spot cosmetic surgery addicts, but it has become astonishingly common.

We are now in the position of watching politicians and newscasters talk about disturbing issues — like, say, the state of our education system, or environmental degradation — yet they cannot muster signals of concern, much less dismay.

One evening, I catch a segment on television about nuclear disarmament. A celebrity spokesperson makes a case for the laying down of arms, and part of my brain clicks into gear: she’s smart and passionate. But another part of me is distracted, because the visuals don’t match the message. Her forehead isn’t wrinkling with concern; her cheeks aren’t crinkling with smiles; her eyes aren’t narrowing in suspicion at trick questions. In fact, no matter what she says, her face is frozen in place. It is grotesquely fascinating — and undermining. Before I know it, the interview is over. The medium overtook the message.

This is counterproductive. Humans are hard-wired to read facial expressions. Those smiles, frowns, grimaces and gazes are as important as words in touching hearts and minds. Politicians and newscasters cannot look wide-eyed and startled about everything; soon, they just look comical.

Photographers (and the editors who publish them) have created an entirely new class of gotcha! moments, capitalizing on our collective shock at surgical distortions. Entire Web sites are devoted to knife-spotting. Actresses, once beautiful or adorable, have so ruined their faces that I wince when I see them onscreen. Celebrities are a small part of the problem, except that they have a pesky way of influencing regular people.

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Extreme, but commonplace, alterations now raise a welter of tricky issues around personal interaction, not the least of which is that one cannot go around asking “who are you?” to people one has spent hours with at dinner parties, or colleagues one has bumped into for years in company hallways.

Bigger problems are surfacing. How do you say to a friend, who secretly disappeared to have her face lifted, that she has made a mistake? You don’t, of course. It is too late. And what about the friend who started with a discreet tuck, or a few lines of filler, and then crossed over into the danger zone? You are watching a slow-motion wreck, but how do you warn her without offense? If her friends don’t, who will?

The best I’ve come up with is something along the lines of gently, pointedly, telling her she is beautiful, beloved and needs no further improvement.

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Funny how this is a tougher subject to broach than almost any other. We find ourselves recalibrating the intimacy of friendships. While once we may have been close enough to share personal tales of broken hearts or fears of going broke, we are unable to visit the issue of the broken self-image.

And that’s what this must be about. We gaze in the mirror, and we loathe the evidence of aging. It is, surely, a change. It is even frightening. Mortality heaves into view. So does unemployment — for women. There seems to be a double standard about aging and leadership.

Of course, vanity is an equal-opportunity predator; more and more men are turning to cosmetic surgery. Still, most men can let themselves go naturally into their mature years as wise elders. But women who don’t adjust their faces are letting themselves go, naturally.

Many people assume that in saying no to knife and needle, you are making a feminist statement; such is the lackluster aura that hangs over that label. Feminism has nothing to do with it. Feminists worry why women still make only 77 cents to every dollar a man makes, not whether women are going broke on Botox.

This is about the birth of yet another “ism” among boomers: ageism. We’ve crossed a line; we are angry that we’re growing old. We’re angry at people who remind us what aging looks like. We are colluding in an elaborate social compact to convince ourselves that we don’t have to go there. And no one wants to say that the Emperor and Empress look better with naked faces.

Several years ago, I stumbled on a book by Diana Vreeland. She was a terrible, hilarious snob, and a great believer in inauthenticity. Her memos to her staff at Vogue in the 1960s are legendary. She lamented the state of women with “broken hair, no hairdresser, no money, no vitality — and the will to live is gone.” In 1967, she wrote: “In my opinion in the year 2001 so many physical problems will have been surmounted that a woman’s beauty will be a dream that will be completely obtainable ... the various feminine rhythms ... will have been removed ... the future holds a golden world.”

The woman who did more to set in gear the feminine rhythms of the fashion industry did not live to see how far appearances could be manipulated: beyond her wildest dreams. But she would have been dismayed by the messy reality.

I get it: some people simply don’t want to go quietly into the years. It is too much to ask that we embrace our changing faces — that we celebrate our mother’s beauty in our own graying hair, that we remember the joy that created those laugh lines, that we recognize our father’s forehead in the way ours wrinkles when we are perplexed, or we catch a glimpse of our aunt’s eyes when our own crinkle with delight.

But could we just ignore the signs of aging? I’m a big believer in denial. It gets a bad rap, but it is often a healthy response. In this, as in so many matters, we could just keep calm and carry on. And if the will to live flags? Hey, make mine an old-fashioned with rye whiskey, please.